speaker, mitt romney weathered a storm of criticism late in the campaign after hurricane sandy for his earlier comments about privatizing fema and turning responsibility back to state and local governments. but during an era of fiscal restraint and global warming, it's high time that we start this conversation in earnest. how big do you want your fema to be? how generous your disaster relief payments and how much do you want to pay for it? in today's "new york times" op-ed section, there's an article that points out potential liability for flood insurance alone is $1.25 trillion. second only to the liability for social security. right now we have arguably the worst of both worlds. the federal government responds to disaster usually paying too much for the wrong people to do the wrong things. we provide federal money to put people back in harm's way and sometimes provide infrastructure to make future risky development worse. we often take remedial action, like for theifying beaches, a temporary solution, that can actually accelerate erosion elsewhere, shift storm damage down the coast t